Tasks and tags look like they solve the same thing and they solve opposite problems. A task goes one level down inside a project. A tag cuts across different projects. Understanding that difference means setting things up once instead of twice.
Tasks
Under Tasks › New task. Every task belongs to a project — that's the only required field besides the name. On Soap Factory's Rebranding, the tasks would be "Brand research", "Visual proposal" and "Brand manual".
Assignee — who's on it. With no assignee, the task sits in everyone's list.
Status — Open, In progress or Done.
Estimated hours — the expected size of the task, to compare later with what it really cost.
Due date — the agreed date.
Billable — inherits from the project and can differ here. Useful when a paid project has a goodwill workstream.
Description and Tags.
The task list has a Start timer action: it starts counting with project and task already filled in. It's the shortest path between deciding what to do and starting to measure.
Tracking hours without a task is allowed and common. The task is what gives your report detail — if you never need to know "how much did the visual proposal cost", you can live without them.
Who can create
Members can create and edit tasks, and that's deliberate: without it, nobody could track hours on anything an admin hadn't set up first. Creating a customer or a project, on the other hand, is a commercial decision and stays with admins and the account owner.
Tags
Under Tags › New tag. A tag has a name and a colour, and can be applied to projects and tasks. It exists to answer questions that cut across the whole portfolio:
How much time does the agency spend in meetings, across all clients?
Does design consume more hours than development this quarter?
How much did the work tagged as rework cost this year?
A few well-chosen tags beat thirty. Too many tags slice the report into small pieces and make everyone on the team tag differently.
One caveat in the tag report
When a piece of work has two tags, it appears on both report rows — and the sum of the rows exceeds the period total. That's not an error: the total at the top is still the correct number, and the screen warns you when it happens. Splitting the 3 hours into 1h30 for each tag would invent a number that exists on no entry at all.
What happens when you delete
Deleting a tag removes it from the projects and tasks it was applied to. The hours stay — what's lost is the ability to cross-cut by that label.
Where to go next
Customers and projects — the layer above tasks.
Timer and manual entry — tracking hours on a task.
Reports — where tags earn their keep.
Your team — what each role can create.
In short: a task goes one level down inside a project and can have an assignee, a due date and an estimate; a tag cuts across projects and serves to group types of work in the report. Members create tasks; customers and projects stay with admins. Use few tags, and be careful with the sum of rows when a piece of work has more than one.